This Week: Notes, Names and New Sites
8 April 2008
This is the latest installment in my regular(ish) series looking at some of what I have read online since last time.
Pass the note
Andy W. wrote a fab post on on Libnotify, the library that makes little notes pop up on Gnome-based Linux desktops (e.g. software updates available).
In passing, Andy mentioned some Python bindings. They seemed quite easy to use:
> import pynotify > > pynotify.init("Warrior") > > note = pynotify.Notification("Command Line Warriors", "Taking control of your own technology") > > note.show()
Pretty sweet. Andrew goes on to explain about making notifications appear on other machines which is even cooler.
I feel the need, the need for speed
I do a lot at the command line, and use a large number of command line utilities, however I do not write particularly advanced scripts in the shell language itself, if it is going to be more than four lines then I tend to write the script in Python.
I know most of the syntax but I don't yet have a feel for what is idomatic, or what is efficient in shell. Pushing me in the right direction is Brock's site which has a post on shell script speed where he times various ways of achieving things in shell.
Standardising failure
Unsurprisingly, the last few weeks of online reading has been dominated by the shambles of a standardisation process that was OOXML. There are far too many to talk about them all, so here is a random selection.
Rob Weir's deadpan response made me laugh quite a bit.
Like me, the venerable Andy Updegrove was tracking the results in real time.
If you are interested in the area, you should really read Andy U's manifesto for "Civil IT Rights". If you read TX's post about Natural Law mentioned below, I think you will get a flavour of where the freedom in technology movement needs to go next.
Some coverage on some french forum linked to here. As did Andy L who has set up another planet and added my blogs to it. Thanks for that.
Boycott Novell rounds up the present situation, arguing that if competing standards is what they want, then that is what we should give them, we should rally round the OpenDocument format and blow OOXML out of the water.
It is nice to see that some of the mainstream tech press took an interest in the OOXML situation.
Security is a process
Justin gives 11 security tips, (yes not a dozen or a top ten, but eleven ;). Measuring myself against his tips, I scored nine out of eleven. How many do you get?
It is good to not understate physical security. I had a laptop stolen from my house, which was rather horrible at the time. In the end, I got a new laptop on my insurance and the burglar got 12 months in prison. However, I am making sure that if it happens again I am totally prepared.
What I am trying to achieve with my laptop is to cover all the bases:
| Threat | Provision |
|---|---|
| Lost hardware | Insurance |
| Lost Data | Backups |
| Data theft | Encryption |
All of which only take a moment to set up, but it is well worth it if my laptop gets stolen again.
Call me Young Gun
Mez has an interesting post about names. People get very touchy about what they are called in online/offline lives.
My approach from when I first had a home page in 1998 has been to be mononymous, to only use my first name online, kind of like Madonna, except without a funny bra.
This went downhill a bit when I got into free/open source software because mailing list archives contain my full name. However, I am trying to get it back together.
In real life no one ever really uses my last name either. Wherever I am, I tend to be the only Zeth.
Newly discovered sites
Talking of names, I noticed a (new to me) site by a guy called K. Mandla in my incoming links. Lots of interesting posts, especially about testing forthcoming software. Another nice post was about console-based word processors. I have not tried them out, but it will be interesting to see what they can add over a text editor such as Emacs or Vim.
Also in my incoming links was a Swedish site by Ake Forslund. I live with a Finn who translated the first page of posts to me. Seems good stuff so if you can read Swedish check it out.
While I am on the topic of incoming links, my review of Torchwood made in onto some Sci-Fi site which is pretty cool.
The Mighty TX has started writing, with an introductory post pointing out the connection between natural law and free/open source software.
That is almost it for this time. If you come across something cool, or write something that has never been covered here, please let me know about it!
Gratuitous Plug
As some of you know, I have a secondary site that takes articles too off- topic for here. In it I advocate largely abolishing prisons, with work gangs for those who can be integrated back into society and the death penalty for those who can't.
I also discuss feminism, the decline in marriage and whether we should legalise polygamy.
1 AJS says...
I'm definitely going to check out WordGrinder!
I grew up using Wordwise Plus on the BBC model B. You typed your text in the 40-column MODE 7 (charmapped to save memory ..... the Beeb's hi-res bitmapped graphics modes swallowed up to 20KB of the available 32KB just for the frame buffer), and it was reformatted to print on the 80-column printer.
In those days, "WYSIWYG" just meant text editing in 80 columns. And printers were text-driven devices, generally with fixed-width fonts. (Of course, dot- matrix printers were capable of producing graphics -- but that's another story.)
"Full WYSIWYG" -- with multiple fonts, proportional spacing, bold, italics and underlining visible on screen -- was undeniably very pretty when it first came on the scene, but most of the time it's really a distraction. You can easily end up paying too much attention to the calligraphy and not enough to the poetry.
Posted at 6:31 a.m. on April 9, 2008